Help Center Doctor
Guide · updated 10 September 2026

Zendesk is discontinuing the Proactive Tickets app on 21 October 2026: what to use instead

If your team uses the Proactive Tickets app from the Zendesk Marketplace to e-mail groups of customers, it stops working on 21 October 2026. This page explains what changes, what does not, the options for after that date, and a checklist to move without losing a campaign.

What is happening

On 7 April 2026 Zendesk announced the discontinuation of seven Built-by-Zendesk apps, among them Proactive Tickets, the free Marketplace app that let agents create a ticket for each user in a list and e-mail them in one go. The timeline in the announcement: no longer available for download since 7 April 2026, no longer supported after 30 June 2026, and it stops functioning after 21 October 2026. Zendesk's stated reason is low usage and capabilities moving into the Agent Workspace; its suggested replacement is the bulk-create tickets API or a custom app built on it, and it notes that Support has no native bulk-ticketing tool. This guide is written by an independent developer and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Zendesk; the announcement is the authoritative source for dates.

What stays and what stops

  • Tickets already created stay. They are ordinary tickets in your account, with their tags, comments and replies. Views, triggers and reports that use them keep working.
  • The triggers stay. The standard "Notify requester of new proactive ticket" trigger is part of Zendesk, not of the app. Any tool that creates a public ticket on a user's behalf can keep using it.
  • The app's own screens stop. Saved audiences, message drafts and campaign lists inside the discontinued app are gone once it is removed. Copy what you need before 21 October: the audiences you use most (tags, organizations, saved searches) and the messages you send regularly.
  • Nothing changes in the API. Bulk ticket creation, search and job statuses are unchanged; that is what every replacement, including ours, is built on.

Your options

1. Proactive Outreach (this developer)

Proactive Outreach is a Marketplace app that runs entirely inside Zendesk Support, with no server and no vendor account. Audience from tags, organizations, ticket requesters or a CSV; exclusions and opt-out tags applied before sending; placeholders with fallbacks and one variant per language; a test ticket to yourself; a delivery engine that respects rate limits and resumes without duplicates; a report with replies, opt-outs, failures and retry. Free up to 200 tickets a month, then $19, $49 or $99 per account per month, 14-day trial. E-mail us to be told when the listing is live.

2. Proactive Campaigns by GrowthDot

An established Marketplace app with scheduling, open tracking and more, hosted by the vendor and priced per agent (from about $5 per agent per month on their listing in September 2026). A good fit for marketing-style campaigns where tracking matters more than keeping data in your own account.

3. Sparkly

A vendor-hosted app priced per account (from about $99 per month in September 2026) with caps on tickets per month. Compare the caps with your volume.

4. A script or an App Builder flow of your own

The Zendesk API creates up to 100 tickets per call with POST /api/v2/tickets/create_many.json and returns a job you poll. It is a day of work to get the happy path going and much more to get exclusions, duplicates after a crash, rate limits and opt-outs right; if you have the engineers and a low volume, it is a valid option.

5. Do nothing

Fine if you sent a campaign once a year. Keep the ticket history; when the next incident comes, pick one of the options above.

Migration checklist

  1. Before 21 October (and while the app still opens): write down the audiences you use (tags, organizations, searches) and copy the messages you send regularly out of the discontinued app.
  2. Check your triggers. In Admin Center, confirm that "Notify requester of new proactive ticket" (or your equivalent) is active, so proactive tickets are still e-mailed. Proactive Outreach checks this for you and can create a tag-scoped trigger if it is missing.
  3. Decide who may send. A campaign to thousands of customers should not be one click away for every agent. Restrict the new tool to a group.
  4. Add an opt-out path. Choose an opt-out tag (for example do_not_contact) and a rule that tags users who reply "stop". Proactive Outreach creates the STOP trigger and applies the tag from the report.
  5. Run a five-person test with colleagues' addresses: check the sender address, the subject, the placeholders, the ticket status and where replies land.
  6. Send the first real campaign small (under 100 people), read the report, then scale.

Questions

Will customers notice a difference? No. A proactive ticket is a ticket created on the customer's behalf with a public comment; the e-mail they receive comes from your trigger and your support address, whichever tool created the ticket.

Can I import my old campaigns? The discontinued app has no export. The tickets it created remain searchable, for example by the tags you used; Proactive Outreach can build an audience from the requesters of those tickets, which is often what "send it again" means.

Where do I ask something? support@helpcenterdoctor.app, answered within one business day.